I am a writer of horror stories, unsettling tales and general weird fiction.
Category: Horror Manga
A collection of horror manga articles by RehnWriter featuring genre breakdowns, recommendations, and deep dives into the best, scariest, and most disturbing titles in horror manga.
I’ve been reading Junji Ito’s works for years now, and I recently came to appreciate Hanging Balloons much more than ever before. It’s, in my opinion, one of Ito’s absolute best stories. It’s deeply disturbing, bizarre, surreal, and absurd, more so than almost any other horror manga.
Plot Overview – The Beginning of a Comically Absurd Apocalypse
The story is told from Kazuko’s perspective and begins with the tragic death of her best friend Terumi, a popular idol. Her death is nothing short of horrific. She’s found outside her apartment, dangling from a noose made of metal, haphazardly wrapped around electrical wires.
From here on out, Hanging Balloons appears to be a simple ghost story. For Temuri’s boyfriend, Shiorishi, states he can see her ghost drifting around the city. Yet there’s something odd about his story. It’s not her full figure, but only a giant floating replica of her head.
Before long, others notice the weird phenomena as well. At first, it’s blamed on hallucinations or mass hysteria. When photographs show up, however, a horrifying reality sets in. Temuri’s floating head is real.
Soon Kazuko bears witness for what’s yet to come. More and more floating heads appearing the sky, all bearing a person’s face, and flying towards them with a noose hanging below. The result is always the same horrific display: a person hung by their own image.
Yet there’s even more danger at hand. Fighting the balloons off won’t work, because if the balloons destroyed, the person they represent will die as well. Thus, all you can do is hide from its relentless approach, but it soon becomes clear that resistance seems all but futile.
What Makes it So Good?
The premise is absurd on paper, but in execution Junji Ito’s Hanging Balloons turns into pure nightmare fuel.
The story’s pacing is masterful. The story starts slowly, almost grounded, before turning into surreal horror. The gradual escalation of the plot makes it so good, and its final scene so much more chilling.
Another reason it works so well is Ito refusing to explain anything. Similarly to works like The Enigma of Amigara Fault or Army of One, the mystery is left intact. We never learn what the balloons are, where they came from or why they exist. The horror remains entirely unknown.
Deeper Interpretations – Idol Culture and the Death Drive
While Hanging Balloons is an excellent story on its own, it’s possible to look at it through a more psychological lens.
In the late 1999s, Japan faced a surge in suicide rates, especially amongst young adults. Suicides amongst public figures, such as idols, were highly publicized. In Japanese culture, idols represent purity and idealized youth. Their deaths often caused emotional shockwaves, and sometimes even copycat suicides amongst their fans.
Viewed this way, Junji Ito’s Hanging Balloons could be seen as an interpretation of the dark sides of idol culture and the contagious effect of public tragedy. Terumi’s death is public, tragic, and afterwards, death keeps spreading, almost like a social or psychological virus.
Each person is haunted by a balloon bearing their own face, which can be seen as a symbol of their internal despair. Once Terumi dies, others begin seeing death as inevitable, personal, inescapable, or even fascinating.
On a deeper psychological level, this mirrors Sigmund Freud’s concept of the death drive (Todestrieb), our unconscious urge towards self-destruction. The balloons externalize this drive. They aren’t random threats. Instead, they represent the characters’ own death, and their fascination with it, seeking them out.
Of course, Junji Ito itself leaves everything unexplained. But these layers of ambiguity, horror mixed not only with psychological but also culture and existential themes, make Hanging Balloons so much more fascinating.
Final Verdict – A Surreal Masterpiece
Hanging Balloons is one of Ito’s finest stories. It’s a blend of surreal, apocalyptic horror with absurdity and existential despair. It’s not just a scary story, but one that gnaws at you in a variety of ways, but without ever giving a clear explanation.
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you check out this surreal, absurd, and most of all, nightmarish masterpiece.
You can find Hanging Balloons in Junji Ito’s horror collection Shiver, available on Amazon.
As a horror writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the extremes of the genre. It wasn’t just fear I was looking for, but violence and the grotesque. Some manga go far beyond psychological scares or supernatural themes and dive straight into raw brutality. This list is dedicated to those works, ...
There’s no one as famous in the world of horror manga today as Junji Ito. He has rightfully amassed a global cult following. Yet Ito is not merely a horror mangaka. He’s one of the greatest horror artists alive today. If you’re a fan of horror, especially horror manga, you’ve ...
As a horror writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the extremes of the genre. It wasn’t just fear I was looking for, but violence and the grotesque. Some manga go far beyond psychological scares or supernatural themes and dive straight into raw brutality. This list is dedicated to those works, to some of the most brutal manga out there.
Brutal manga are violent, graphic, and often deeply disturbing. They show dismemberment, cruelty, revenge, and the ugliest sides of humanity in all their glory. These manga aren’t just gory. They‘re intense, uncompromising and hard to forget.
Whether it’s physical savagery, emotional devastation, or grotesque imagery, every entry on this list pushes the limits of what can be shown and what readers can handle.
So if you’re looking for the most brutal manga out there, this is where to start.
Mild spoiler warning: I keep things vague, but it’s hard to talk about brutality without giving anything away.
Here’s my curated list of the most brutal manga I’ve ever read (last updated: July 2025).
@ Masaya Hokazono, Seima Taniguchi – Pumpkin Night
Pumpkin Night by Hokazono Masay and Seima Taniguchi is a grotesque, over-the-top slasher manga that exists for one reason alone: to show ultraviolent carnage in the most creative and absurd ways possible.
After enduring horrific bullying and being institutionalized, Naoko Kirino escapes from a mental hospital and sets out for revenge, now wearing a pumpkin head and armed with an appetite for murder. The kills are inventive, excessive, and genuinely brutal: faces carved off by jagged scopes, brains dissolved with acid, and intestines flying across page after page.
While the manga carries an ecchi tag, it’s fairly tame, aside from a few fanservice scenes. What takes the center stage is clearly the unforgiving violence.
@ Masaya Hokazono, Seima Taniguchi – Pumpkin Night
What really sets Pumpkin Night apart is how ridiculous it gets. The story quickly descends into chaotic madness, eventually involving government conspiracies, cartoonishly evil side characters, and even Donald Trump makes an appearance. It’s completely unhinged, but it knows it is.
While the writing is pure B-movie exploitation schlock, and the characters barely resemble real people, the artwork is surprisingly strong, making the gore scenes disturbingly effective.
Another thing that stands out is the manga’s fan translation. It leans heavily into the manga’s edgy tone, and adds its own crude, and occasionally offensive humor to the mess.
Pumpkin Night is pure guilty pleasure splatterpunk. It’s not a good manga, so if you’re looking for something sophisticated, skip it. But if you want raw, unapologetic violence pushed to absurd extremes, be sure to check it out.
Dai Dark is what happens when you let Q Hayashida, the chaotic mind behind Dorohedoro, go crazy in space.
The premise is simple: Zaha Sanko’s bones are cursed, and whoever possesses them can have any wish granted. This makes him a walking target across the entire galaxy. Instead of angst and terror, however, Dai Dark turns this setup into a black comedy drenched in sci-fi gore. Sanko and his companions, Avakian, Shimada, and Damemaru, slice, melt, and obliterate their way through hordes of cosmic freaks, all while cracking deadpan jokes.
The violence is absurdly over-the-top: bodies explode, bones erupt from skin, and people are dismembered mid-sentence. Yet it’s all delivered with a bizarre, almost casual sense of humor. It’s brutal, sure, but so exaggerated it becomes hilarious.
@ Q Hayashida – Dai Dark
Compared to Dorohedoro, this manga leans even harder into chaos and absurdity. The art is stunning, grotesque, amongst the best in the medium, and full of nightmarish creatures and space-tech horrorscapes.
That said, Dai Dark doesn’t have tight plotting or emotional depths. It’s an unrestrained space adventure, and its overarching plot feels more like an excuse to add more visual madness. The cast, while fun and charming, is less memorable than Dorohedoro’s. We occasionally catch a glimpse of Sanko’s past at the Leviathan Elementary School Ship Treegun, but these rarely have any impact on the story. It’s clear that the bizarre imagery is front and center here.
Dai Dark is a hyper-violent, ultra-creative descent into sci-fi insanity. It’s not here to make deep points, it’s here to melt faces, tear off limbs, and make you laugh while you witness it. If you’re in for carnage, Q Hayashida delivers non-stop.
Juujika no Rokunin is one of the most controversial revenge manga of recent years, and for a good reason. It’s exploitative, morally bankrupt, and almost laughably over the top. Surprisingly, though, it’s also a guilty pleasure for anyone craving a raw, sadistic payback.
Shun Uruma is bullied severely by five deranged classmates. When they target his family, his life collapses completely. Under the guidance of his WWII veteran grandfather, Uruma trains in secret for four years before enacting his revenge. What follows is a vicious murder spree that takes graphic retribution to absurd extremes.
Juujika no Rokunin is, bluntly, torture porn in manga form. Every villain is cartoonishly evil, women exist only to be sexually assaulted. The writing takes itself way too seriously, and the violence is ridiculous. Yet the art is damned good, and it’s weirdly satisfying to watch Uruma dismantle each of his abusers.
@ Shiryuu Nakatake – Juujika no Rokunin
The biggest problem is the manga’s second half. Juujika no Rokunin pivots from a tight revenge story to a bloated, unfocused mess. There’s a timeskip, new characters, and an endless final arc that has long lost its momentum. What starts off as an entertaining brutal manga centering on revenge becomes nothing but a slog.
Still, if you want brutal violence, creative torture scenes, and cold-blooded revenge, this delivers, at least for the first 100 chapters. Just don’t expect anything profound or balanced. Juujika no Rokunin is an ugly, excessive and undeniably brutal manga.
Kazuo Umezu is a name every horror manga fan should know. Often considered the godfather of the genre, Umezu’s influence runs deep. While The Drifting Classroom is his most famous work, God’s Left, Devil’s Right Hand is by far his most brutal.
The manga follows a boy Sou, who experiences supernatural visions of disturbing events before they happen. Each arc centers on gruesome incidents, some grounded in real-world horrors like serial killers, other delving into the surreal, the occult, or full-on nightmare logic. Every single story is soaked in violence. Whether it’s mutilation, dismemberment or grotesque body horror, Umezu delivers some of the most extreme imagery in his career.
Especially the infamous Eroded Scissors and Tongue of the Spider Queen arcs loaded with disturbingly creative gore.
That said, not all chapters are equal. Some are stronger and more coherent than others, but they’re all exceedingly brutal. And while Umezu’s art style might not appeal to everyone, and is often described as old-fashioned, stiff, and ugly, it’s uniquely effective when it comes to delivering horrifying visuals.
God’s Left Hand, Devil’s Right Hand, is violent, strange, and at times completely unhinged. It may be a mixed bag, but for its sheer intensity and originality, it remains one of the most brutal horror manga ever made.
Genres: Horror, Supernatural, Mystery
Status: Finished (Seinen)
14. Misumisou
@ Rensuki Oshikiri – Misumisou
Misumisou is one of the most brutal revenge manga ever written. It’s made even more disturbing by the fact that nearly every character involved is a middle schooler.
After moving from Tokyo to a rural town, Haruka Nozaki becomes the target of relentless bullying. Her classmates torment her in increasingly violent ways until one horrifying incident pushes everything past the point of no return. What follows is a blood-soaked descent into revenge, trauma and psychological collapse.
This brutal manga is infamous for its sheer intensity. The violence is extreme: faces are slashed, skulls crushed, guts spill freely, and the characters, all teenagers, stab, bludgeon and kill each other without remorse. It isn’t just gory, it’s nasty.
@ Rensuki Oshikiri – Misumisou
At times, Misumisou seems to strive for social commentary, suggesting that abuse breeds abuse, and violence begets more violence, but the execution is messy. Many of the characters feel like deranged caricatures, from the cartoonishly evil bullies to the morally bankrupt adults. Everyone feels unhinged, which can undercut the realism the manga tries to convey.
The art is divisive. Rensuke Oshikiri has a unique style and his characters often were grotesque, exaggerated expressions that can look more unintentional than unsettling. This, however, makes the violent scenes hit even harder.
Misumisou is not a refined work. It’s blunt, ugly, and emotionally draining. But if you’re looking for sheer brutality, few manga go this far. Just be prepared for a deeply uncomfortable ride, and a story that trades nuance for shock value.
Genres: Horror, School Life, Tragedy, Revenge (Josei)
Parasyte is one of the most iconic body horror manga ever created, and easily one of the most brutal of its time. First serialized in the 90s, this sci-fi horror classic by Hitoshi Iwaaki still holds up today thanks to its grotesque creature design, visceral violence, and bleak, unflinching tone.
The story follows Shinichi Izumi, a high school student who’s attacked by a worm-like alien parasite. Unlike most victims, he stops the creature from reaching his brain, so it settles in his right hand instead. The two are now forced to coexist, but other parasites aren’t so restrained. They fully consume their human hosts and go to feed on other humans in secret.
Parasyte doesn’t hold back in showing what these creatures are capable of. Each parasite can reshape its host’s body into deadly forms. We see tentacles, flesh blades, mouths, and much more. These transformations are nightmarish, and the speed and efficiency with which these monsters kill is terrifying. Victims are mauled, torn to shreds or even devoured alive. There are panels in this manga that are outright disturbing in how detailed the violence is. Parasyte may be philosophical in part, but the carnage is front and center.
Despite its age, Parasyte remains one of the goriest, most brutal manga to come out of its era, and one of the smartest. It’s a rare blend of high-concept sci-fi horror and ruthless, full-page splatter. If you want something that’s equal parts intelligent and horrifyingly brutal, Parasyte is a must-read.
MPD Psycho is one of the most brutal and cerebral crime-horror manga ever written. Don’t expect edge just for edge’s sake, though. What makes this manga so disturbing is its cold, clinical brutality, rendered in almost surgical detail.
The story follows Kazuhiko Amamiya, a detective suffering from dissociative identity disorder. At first, the manga seems episodic, with Amamiya solving a string of grotesquely violent murders. Before long, however, it morphs into something much deeper and darker. What unfolds is a sprawling psychological mystery.
The brutality in MPD Psycho isn’t just about flashy splatter or revenge carnage, it’s about systematic cruelty and body horror delivered without an ounce of empathy. Victims are dissected, reassembled into grotesque sculptures, or turned into living dolls. It’s hard to stomach not just the gore, but the complete emotional detachment with which it’s presented.
Shou Tajima’s artwork is razor-sharp and unflinching. There’s no messiness. Every corpse and every mutilation is drawn with chilling precision. The cleanliness of the linework only makes the violence feel more sterile and real.
What separates MPD Psycho from other brutal manga is that it doesn’t glorify the violence, it intellectualizes it. That makes it more disturbing, but also more impactful. The story is complex, sometimes to a fault because of shifting personalities, and a dense, twisting plot that demands close attention. But beneath it all is a manga obsessed with identity, control, and what happens when the human mind is broken on purpose.
If you’re looking for relentless violence, MPD Psycho delivers, but with surgical restrained rather than splatterpunk. It’s one of the smartest and most haunting brutal manga of its kind.
@ Yoshiaki Tabata, Yuuki Yugo – Wolf Guy: Ookami no Monshou
Wolf Guy: Ookami no Monshou is one of the most brutal and controversial action-horror manga out there. Stylish, savage, and soaked in blood, it’s a manga that offers one of the most feral depictions of the werewolf mythos in modern manga. It also dives into incredibly dark, at times, deeply uncomfortable territory.
The story follows Akira Inugami, a lone transfer student who seems to invite violence wherever he goes. After surviving a gang attack, he arrives at his new school without a scratch. Unbeknownst to his classmates, Inugami is a werewolf. He heals instantly, doesn’t age normally, and tries to stay out of conflict.
@ Yoshiaki Tabata, Yuuki Yugo – Wolf Guy: Ookami no Monshou
This manga doesn’t hold back. It features extreme violence, torture, sexual assault, and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness at times. Characters are mutilated, shot, eviscerated, and brutalized. Later arcs involve a mass shooting and a prolonged sequence of sexual abuse. These moments make Wolf Guy one of the most difficult manga on this list to stomach, and one of the most controversial. Many readers drop it entirely during that stretch and it’s easy to see why.
And yet, for all its faults, Wolf Guy is strangely compelling. Akira is a stoic, almost mythical protagonist, while Haguro is one of the most sadistic villains in manga. The art is sleek and cinematic, especially during the many vicious fight scenes.
If you’re drawn to unrelenting violence and tragedy with a supernatural edge, there’s nothing quite like it. But be warned, Wolf Guy isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s one of the most brutal manga out there.
Genres: Action, Psychological, Supernatural, School Life
Starving Anonymous is one of the most viscerally brutal horror manga of the last decade. It’s grotesque, disturbing and relentless in its depiction of human suffering.
The premise alone is horrific enough. Two high schoolers, Ie and Kazuo, are kidnapped and wake up in a refrigerated truck full of corpses. They’re inside a secret human meat processing facility where people are fattened like livestock, forcibly bred, harvested or fed alive to monstrous insectoid aliens.
This gore isn’t just there for shock value. No, it’s systemic, mechanical brutality. We see rows of humans being pumped with synthetic feed, bred like cattle, and butchered without mercy.
Things get even worse once the aliens show up. They are nightmarish, insectoid creatures with only a single purpose to consume. Their victims are skinned alive, crushed into pulp, ripped limb from limb, or devoured in seconds. The sheer variety and detail of the violence is staggering.
The art by Inabe Kazu leans into every moment of carnage. It’s drawn with unflinching precision. We watch flesh splitting, bones snapping and eyes bulging in terror. There’s a near-clinical insanity to the way it captures pain, panic, and body horror.
Unfortunately, the manga veers into sci-fi action midway through, introducing regenerating humans, conspiracies, and escalating insanity. Even though it never loses its oppressive, dehumanizing tone. The violence is constant, and the sense of despair never fades.
Starving Anonymous is not for the faint of heart. It’s pure dystopian carnage: nihilistic, grotesque and absolutely brutal. Few manga deliver this level of gore and horror with such sustained intensity.
Battle Royal is one of my favorite movies of all time. The manga adaption of Koushun Takami’s novel, while more exaggerated than either the film or the book, is without a doubt one of the most brutal manga I’ve ever read.
Each year, one middle school class is randomly chosen to participate in The Program. They are then dropped onto a remote island and forced to kill each other until only one remains. Shuuya Nanahara, our protagonist, rejects the system and seeks to survive without taking lives, though, as the bodies pile up, that goal becomes harder and harder to keep.
The setup is already disturbing, but what makes Battle Royal especially intense is the level of graphic violence. The manga goes all in. We see beheadings, disembowelments, brutal stabbings, exploding collars, and plenty of emotional breakdowns. It’s relentless and messy, but in the best way possible.
The story expands the original novel by giving each student a backstory, some heartfelt, others horrifying, before inevitably killing them off. The structure can feel formulaic, but it creates emotional weight and tension even for minor characters.
The manga’s not without flaws, though. The character design is wildly inconsistent. Some look like normal teenagers, others like children, and some like they’re in their thirties. Kawada, in particular, feels like an entirely different age group. While the tone leans into psychological horror, it sometimes veers into manga-style exaggeration that strains believability.
Still, Battle Royal remains a standout in the brutal manga category. It’s raw, nihilistic, and disturbing. If you’re into death games, psychological violence, and chaos, this one’s a must-read.
Jagaaaaaan is a hyper-stylized, ultra-violent descent into madness, body horror, and psychosexual chaos, brought to life by some of the most grotesquely detailed art in modern manga.
Written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro, the story follows Shintarou Jagasaki, a disillusioned neighborhood cop who secretly fantasizes about blowing away people who annoy him. One day, those fantasies become a horrifying reality when a man on a train transforms into a monster and starts slaughtering civilians. In the chaos, Jagasaki discovers his own powers: the ability to fire explosive bullets from his arm. Thus begins his transformation into a fractured human, and his quest to eradicate them. The violence in Jagaaaaaan is excessive in every way possible. Bodies erupt, flesh tears, skulls are smashed, and the sheer scale of destruction can be overwhelming.
The gore is constant, unapologetic, and made even more jarring by Kensuke Nishida’s gorgeous, twisted art. The fractured humans themselves are truly grotesque, and each transformation is a nightmarish blend of personal vice and physical mutation.
Jagaaaaaan isn’t just brutal for the sake of action. It’s also disturbing in its themes. Many fractured humans act out their suppressed desires, often with horrifying consequences. There’s one recurring character in particular whose actions push the story into extreme territory.
Stylistically, Jagaaaaaan is pure excess, narratively and visually. The tone swings from black comedy, grotesque violence, and uncomfortable sexual content. The cast is loaded with eccentric, twisted and unhinged characters.
Ultimately, Jagaaaaaan is not for everyone. It’s loud, edgy and often offensive. But if you’re looking for stylized brutality, disturbing concepts, and some of the best monster design out there, this one delivers.
Genres: Action, Horror, Supernatural, Comedy
Status: Finished (Seinen)
7. Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw
@ Rei Mikamoto – Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw
Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw is easily the weirdest, trashiest, and most unapologetically stupid manga on this list, and that’s exactly why it earns its spot.
This splatterpunk fever dream follows Geeko, a delinquent schoolgirl armed with a chainsaw, as she battles herself through hordes of former classmates who’ve been turned into grotesque, zombified monsters by her deranged science-obsessed ex-friend, Nero. The premise is absurd; the tone is chaotic, and the violence is turned up to eleven.
Calling this manga over-the-top would be an understatement. It’s an explosion of hyper-violence, dumb comedy, and excessive fanservice. Bodies are torn apart in ludicrously gory ways, limbs fly, and blood splatters across the page. But it’s not trying to be scary or serious. This can be best described as Troma-core in manga form.
@ Rei Mikamoto – Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw
One thing that might turn a lot of readers off is the excessive fanservice. The manga features copious amounts of nudity, and constantly shows Geeko, a teenager, in skimpy outfits and exaggerated poses. Yet the manga doesn’t even try to justify it. No, it wants to be trashy; it thrives on it, and goes the full way.
The art is rough, but it suits the chaotic tone. Action scenes are energetic, if occasionally messy, and the monster design is genuinely creative and gross. Unfortunately, the characters suffer from same-face syndrome and anatomical oddities.
Still, for all its flaws, Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw is an unfiltered exploitation manga. It’s grotesque, stupid, loud, but also incredibly fun if you’re in the mood for something outrageous. This isn’t just brutal. It’s the equivalent of a shitty midnight movie, and boy, do I love it.
Dorohedoro is one of the most brutal manga you’ll ever read, but also one of the strangest. Q Hayashida blends grotesque violence with slapstick humor and surreal world-building in a way that feels uniquely unhinged, but never incoherent.
Set in the bleak, run-down city of Hole, where magic users treat humans as disposable test subjects, Dorohedoro kicks off with a reptile-headed man named Kaiman. Immune to magic and cursed with amnesia, he hunts sorcerers to find the one responsible for his transformation.
Violence is a constant in Dorohedoro. Heads explode, limbs are torn off, and guts spill across city streets. Yet it isn’t the gore that makes Dorohedoro so memorable, it’s the way it plays horror for laughs, while still delivering disturbing body horror with a straight face. The tonal whiplash is part of its brilliance. One moment you’re chuckling about a joke, the next you watch someone being brutally dismembered.
Later arcs ramp things up to outright nightmare fuel. The final arc is especially vicious. We witness grotesque transformation, ritualistic slaughter, and outright carnage. Kaiman himself becomes a walking nightmare, sprouting twisted, tumor-like heads from his body in scenes that are as visually stunning as they are disturbing.
Q Hayashida’s gritty art seals the deal. Her dense, grimy linework gives texture to both the dingy Hole and the bizarre elegance of the Sorcerer’s World. Every panel feels alive with grime, chaos, and character.
Dorohedoro is surreal, hilarious, and deeply violent. The fact it can be this brutal while also being fun is a testament to just how original and bizarre a masterpiece it truly is.
Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Supernatural, Mystery, Slice of Life
Shigurui is arguably the most brutal samurai manga ever created. Not just in terms of violence, but in its unflinching portrayal of a culture built on cruelty, hierarchy, and dehumanization.
Based on the first chapter of Norio Najo’s novel, Shigurui begins with a grim spectacle: a one-armed swordsman, Gennosuke Fujiki, is set to fight the blind and lame Seigen Irako in a martial arts tournament using live blades. Rather than jumping straight into the bloodbath, however, the manga pulls back and shows us the path that led both men to this moment.
Make no mistake, Shigurui is astonishingly brutal. Bodies are cleaved open, intestines spill, and limbs fly. The gore is anatomical, detailed, and deeply grounded in its era’s cold reality. But what makes Shigurui truly disturbing is how violence reflects the character’s inner corruption.
Author Takayuki Yamaguchi doesn’t romanticize the bushido code. Instead, he tears it apart, revealing a world where honor is pretext for sadism, and loyalty becomes an excuse for subjugation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the brutal treatment of women. Characters like Mie are reduced to tools for producing heirs, with no agency beyond what their male masters allow. The manga doesn’t exploit this; it condemns it.
Shigurui is visually stunning. Its art is meticulous, with breathtaking spreads and richly rendered characters that heighten both the beauty and horror of every moment. It’s one of the best-drawn manga out there.
Grim, elegant, and absolutely unrelenting, Shigurui is not for the faint of heart. If you’re looking for a samurai manga that dares to be brutally honest about the cost of its code, there’s nothing else like it.
Genres: Action, Historical, Drama, Tragedy, Martial Arts
Ichi the Killer is one of the most depraved, disturbing, and brutal manga ever created, and yet, it’s also one of my favorites.
The story follows two heavily damaged men: Ichi, the titular killer, a repressed emotionally unstable young man, manipulated into committing gruesome acts of violence; and Kakihara, a sadistic yakuza enforcer obsessed with pain, chaos, and finding his missing boss. Their paths collide in a blood-soaked descent into the darkest corners of human desire and cruelty.
Ichi the Killer is soaked in violence. It features graphic mutilations, torture, rape, and murder. But it’s no mere gorefest. What elevates Ichi the Killer is its psychological depth. It explores sadism and masochism, trauma, manipulation, and identity in ways that are as horrifying as they are thought-provoking. These aren’t caricatures of madness; they’re disturbing reflections of broken psyches pushed to the extreme.
There’s no filter here. Hideo Yamamoto drags us through the filthy underbelly of society, presenting some of the most twisted characters you’ll ever meet. It’s sick, yes, but it’s also incredibly compelling. The tension between revulsion and intrigue is where Ichi the Killer thrives.
It’s not a manga for the faint of heart. In fact, it might be too much for many readers. If you can stomach its depravity, however, you’ll find one of the rawest, most psychologically intense stories ever told. Brutal, unsettling, and unforgettable.
Gantz is one of the most insane, violent and over-the-top brutal manga ever created, and that’s exactly why it stands out.
The story begins with Kei Kurono and his childhood friend Katou getting killed in a train accident. Instead of dying, they wake up in a strange Tokyo apartment with a group of other recently deceased people and a mysterious black sphere named Gantz. It gives them weapons, suits, and a mission: hunt and kill aliens hiding among humans. Refusal means death; success means survival, at least until the next mission.
What starts off as a gritty survival manga quickly spirals into something much larger. The enemies become bigger, weirder, and more grotesque, the action becomes increasingly chaotic, and the body count never stops climbing. Gantz is brutal in every sense. People are torn apart, crushed, sliced, and dismembered. The manga thrives on violence, both in and out of combat.
It doesn’t shy away from sexual violence, bullying, mass shootings, or psychological breakdowns either. Everything is exaggerated, explicit, and unfiltered.
Gantz is not just mindless gore, though. It’s fast-paced and endlessly unpredictable. It builds momentum through escalating absurdity and pushing characters to their limits. It’s not always coherent, but it’s never boring. Interestingly enough, the character writing in Gantz is fantastic. Kurono starts out as an unlikeable, selfish teenager, but slowly develops into a dependable leader.
If you’re looking for tight, polished storytelling, Gantz isn’t it. But if you want a relentless, hyper-violent manga that constantly one-ups the madness, there’s nothing quite like it.
Tomie might be Junji Ito’s most brutal manga. While Uzumaki and Gyo are disturbing and grotesque in their own right, Tomie stands apart for the sheer number of mutilations, murders and acts of psychotic obsession that play out across its many chapters.
The story begins with the death of a beautiful high school student named Tomie. After she’s caught in a scandal involving both a classmate and her teacher, tensions explode during a school trip. Tomie is killed, dismembered by her classmates, and her remains are hidden. Yet the very next day, she returns to class, alive and completely unbothered.
This moment sets the tone for the rest of the series. Tomie isn’t a normal girl, but an entity with terrifying regenerative abilities. No matter how many times she is killed, stabbed, or torn to pieces, she always comes back.
What makes Tomie so brutal is not just the repeated violence done to her body. It’s that every man she meets becomes obsessed by an uncontrollable desire to have her, and eventually to destroy her. Again and again, we witness her suitors succumb to madness, reenacting her death with disturbing glee. The cycle of desire, murder, and regeneration is horrifying, and strangely tragic.
The manga’s episodic format is uneven. Some chapters are brilliant, others forgettable. When Tomie hits, though, it contains some of Junji Ito’s most unsettling and gory imagery. Ito doesn’t flinch away from the carnage. If anything, he leans into it, showing the full consequence of obsession and the horror of beauty that can’t die.
IF you only read one Junji Ito manga and you’re here for the brutality, Tomie is the one to choose.
Rest in peace Kentaro Miura, thanks for sharing your gift with the world.
Berserk is not only one of the greatest manga ever created but also one of the most brutal.
This dark fantasy epic follows Guts, the Black Swordsman, a lone warrior wielding a sword as tall as himself on a relentless quest for revenge.
At first glance, Berserk may seem like a simple revenge story. But with the second arc, The Golden Age, Miura reveals the depth of both his world and his characters. It’s here that we come to understand Guts’ past, and meet the enigmatic Griffith, one of the most unforgettable characters in manga.
The world of Berserk is grim, violent, and merciless. War, rape, torture, ritual sacrifice, and religious fanaticism are ever-present. The brutality isn’t just for shock; it serves the narrative, painting a world where survival demands strength, and morality often doesn’t matter.
The battles are savage and spectacular, whether its medieval warfare or Guts clashing with Apostles. Limbs fly, bodies are torn apart, and blood floods the pages. And then there’s the Eclipse. It’s perhaps the single most horrifying event ever depicted in manga. It’s an event of such overwhelming violence and despair that it leaves a permanent mark on anyone who reads it.
The Apostles themselves are a masterclass in grotesque design. They are magnificent, monstrous, and merciless. Their presence signals carnage, and their victims rarely die clean.
Yes, Berserk is a brutal manga, but it’s also a masterpiece. It’s a work of staggering emotional and artistic power. If there’s one manga that deserves the top spot on this list, it’s this one.
There’s no one as famous in the world of horror manga today as Junji Ito. He has rightfully amassed a global cult following.
Yet Ito is not merely a horror mangaka. He’s one of the greatest horror artists alive today. If you’re a fan of horror, especially horror manga, you’ve likely encountered his work.
Ito’s body of work is as strange as it is distinctive, and reading his manga feels like falling down a very particular rabbit hole.
@ Junji Ito – Tomie, Enigma of Amigara Fault, Uzumaki
His catalogue spans hundreds of pages of short fiction collected in English anthologies, as well as several longer works that showcase his skill at building uniquely unsettling worlds. Whether you start with a one-shot or a full volume, the same obsessions return: bodily transformations, cosmic horror, psychological collapse, and the corruption of the mundane.
In the sections below, I explore these elements, the signature techniques of his visual style, and his recurring narrative themes.
I first learned about Junji Ito a decade and a half ago when I was searching online for new horror manga to read. At the time, I was still new to the genre, but the prospect of a manga that was supposed to “give me nightmares” sounded interesting enough. That manga was Tomie, and when I finally read it, it was everything I desired in a work of horror and much more. It was full of outlandish ideas and terrifying imagery.
The next manga by Junji Ito I read was Gyo, which was as nightmarish as Tomie but much more surreal, weird, and absurd. His style was as fantastically disturbing and nightmarish as in Tomie.
What finally sold me and made me a lifelong fan of his work was Junji Ito’s masterpiece, Uzumaki. It’s the story of the small coastal town of Kurouzu-cho, which is haunted by spirals. The story was outlandish, the imagery disturbing. It felt completely unique and was unlike any other horror manga I’d read until then. For readers curious about Uzumaki, I also put together a short article about my favorite Uzumaki chapters.
Over the years, I’ve read countless horror manga, both by well-known and lesser-known writers, as you can see in the list of my favorite horror manga. Still, Junji Ito’s works hold a special place in my heart and are, in my opinion, among the best horror manga of all time. His works are so strange, so unique, and so outlandish that I find myself going back to them time and again.
What makes Junji Ito’s works so fantastic is his blend of outlandish, sometimes supernatural horror with the mundane. Junji Ito’s work truly shines because it’s a very specific kind of horror. His stories seldom feature killers or monsters. Instead, his horror is often unexplained, comes from powers outside our influence, or arises from our own faults, fears, obsessions, and phobias.
Sometimes his premises are strange, even ridiculous, but Junji Ito makes them work. The idea of a town haunted by spirals becomes one of the most disturbing and unique horror works of all time. Balloons that take on people’s faces and hunt them down become a nightmarish apocalypse. Even a story about human-shaped holes revealed after an earthquake becomes a setting for outlandish existential horror and deadly curiosity.
Junji Ito’s works stand out for their blend of masterful imagery and the narrative themes they explore. It’s worth noting that his nightmarish imagery and disturbing ideas often conceal deeper themes and ideas to ponder.
One can’t talk about Junji Ito without first discussing cosmic horror. The genre was shaped by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. It centers on the idea that the most horrible realization is that humanity is ultimately meaningless in the greater scope of the universe. Worse, there are powers and beings far older and more powerful than we can imagine. They existed long before humans emerged and will remain long after we are gone. Our lives, our dreams, our problems are all meaningless in the vastness of the cosmos.
While Junji Ito is influenced by Lovecraft, he has created his own blend of cosmic horror, often stranger and more surreal than Lovecraft’s. Humans are powerless in Ito’s worlds; while some works, like Uzumaki, feature unknown forces or entities, much of his horror focuses on the intimate and mundane.
Another similarity is that cosmic horror and Ito’s work seldom feature central villains or antagonists. We don’t encounter evil in the traditional sense. Instead, the terror arises from our own realizations or from inexplicable forces at the edges of comprehension.
Junji Ito’s works are well known for his distinctive personal style. He brings his horrors to life through masterful ink and line work.
Ito uses detailed line work and bold, almost unsettling blacks to present grotesque, shocking imagery. While he uses shading, his pages mostly rely on lines to convey texture. Even gore and other unsettling elements, like blood, wet and squishy surfaces, are rendered almost entirely with lines. This gives them a unique look, adds detail, and lends a more visceral, nauseating quality.
He also leans on stark contrast, both in environments and in characters.
Ito’s style is most recognizable in his characters. They never blush and seldom show ordinary happiness. Instead, they are often emotionally muted, and when emotion appears it arrives as exaggeration.
His characters frequently look empty and lifeless even before the horror begins, especially in stories focused on personal horror or mental illness. You can see how badly they feel and how close they already are to the abyss that will swallow them. Their faces are marked by sunken cheeks, and their bodies are often sickly thin, almost skeletal. Dark circles around the eyes and unnatural irises signal heavy emotions such as depression and gloom.
He achieves this with minimal shading and heavy contrast across the face. Ito often focuses on the eyes and the mouth, using them to convey unnatural emotional reactions.
His characters often wear unsettling expressions. Whether smiles or sorrow, the features are grotesquely accentuated, giving them a surreal quality.
When the true horror arrives, Ito goes all out in depicting a person’s emotional response. Terrified expressions are so exaggerated they make us uncomfortable. Mouths gape, faces distort and elongate mid-scream, and eyes open wide.
Another signature element is his reliance on body horror and the distortion of the human form. He often avoids traditional monsters; instead, the terror comes from our own bodies. People are twisted, warped, and turned into shapes that barely resemble human beings. We see bodies curling into spirals, rotting into abominations, or stretching into elongated versions of themselves.
This reliance on body horror makes Ito’s work so terrifying. Often the horror does not come from outside, but from within our own bodies. It is both strangely fascinating and deeply disturbing.
Junji Ito’s Narrative Themes
As a writer, I’m often fascinated by Junji Ito’s work not only for its visual power but also for the recurring elements that shape his stories. While his work can be graphic, Ito employs a wide range of narrative themes to craft his unique blend of horror. His concepts are bizarre, sometimes even absurd, but incredibly creative. By contrast, his characters and settings are often as mundane as can be, at times even boring, which grounds the strangeness.
Many of his tales revolve around fears, obsessions, and phobias, showing what happens when people give in to them. Yet they also carry deeper meanings that may not be visible at first glance. Below, I discuss those elements in more detail.
Junji Ito’s work doesn’t follow traditional storytelling conventions.
Most of his characters are minimally characterized, and there is little overt character development. Instead, characters are often blank slates or exist to embody a specific fear or obsession.
The same applies to plot. Ito’s stories seldom rely on intricate plotting. More often he gives us a glimpse into someone’s life and lets us witness the horrible things that befall them. Above all, his work is about atmosphere, dread, and the gruesome demise of his characters.
Although Ito writes horror stories, there is seldom a clear, traditional antagonist. People are haunted by faceless entities, curses, higher powers, or their own psychological problems.
One of the biggest pitfalls in horror is the urge to explain what should remain inexplicable, or to add too many details. Ito seldom does this. Instead, he leaves us with the mystery, leaving us guessing and fearing the unknown. A prime example is Hanging Balloons. We never get an explanation of what the balloons are, where they came from, or why they exist. He simply shows what happens after they appear, lets us watch events through his characters’ eyes, and ends the story when their time on the page is over. The mystery remains intact and, with it, the horror.
Gyo is an example where Ito breaks this convention. Near the end, he offers a scientific explanation for the apocalyptic horror that unfolds, and it didn’t work for me. It feels almost comically absurd and undercuts the menace.
Junji Ito’s stories often begin in normalcy. They don’t open with a dramatic backstory or by introducing an antagonist. Instead, they start in the most mundane places. We watch characters go to school, fall in love, or visit the hospital. It is in these ordinary settings that Ito slowly introduces the horror.
The same is true of the horror itself. In many stories, the threat emerges from mundane places or is triggered by everyday objects: records, laughter, hair, and even concepts such as spirals.
Many of his stories center on ordinary fears: the unknown depths of the ocean, claustrophobia, being watched, a sweaty, dirty mattress, or holes in a wall. Ito takes these anxieties up a notch. He twists them into something irrational and surreal, magnifies them, and turns them into phobias. At their core, though, they are fears many of us share.
Ito then bends these mundane settings and puts his ordinary characters under pressure until the world turns into horror. What begins as an everyday scenario becomes uncomfortable to watch; it is warped, and the surreal takes over.
This contrast between the mundane and the horrors he conjures is what makes his work feel so distinctive. We see it most in his characters. Their almost expressionless faces are twisted into masks of terror, with exaggerated features that barely resemble themselves. It is as if not only the story but also the characters are warped into something entirely different, something horrifying.
There are also stories grounded in reality. A great example is The Bully, one of his most realistic and most terrifying works.
It’s not only Junji Ito’s stories that are mundane; his characters are, too. They are nobodies, often blank slates who become entangled in Ito’s horrors.
They are frequently students or everyday people living ordinary lives. His characters are rarely the heroes of their stories; they are seldom smart or resourceful protagonists. Instead, they often serve as vessels through which Ito gives us a glimpse into his world of horrors.
Worse, they are sometimes foolish, driven by curiosity or desire. And when his characters do show strong emotion, it is almost always a single one. A fear, phobia, or desire becomes the defining trait, is often the only one they display, and it ultimately leads to their demise.
Junji Ito is a fantastic writer and artist, but he is not a character writer. His characters are merely there to be tested, and many feel like lambs led to the slaughter.
We all know irrational or childish fears. When we were young, we were afraid of the monsters under the bed, the doctor, strange neighbors, or even shadows.
As adults, we understand those are nothing more than irrational fears. There is no boogeyman, and there are no monsters out to get us.
Ito’s work, however, often features exactly these fears. That recognition gives his stories an uncanny feeling, because we have seen these scenarios before. We too were afraid to visit the doctor, and we too were afraid of the monsters under the bed, and even now we carry our own eccentricities and phobias. Ito explores and exploits them. He takes the most irrational, even silly fears, gives them life, and as a result his stories become much more terrifying.
Junji Ito is a master of body horror. He isn’t satisfied with people simply dying. Instead, he often distorts, warps, and twists them. This is visible not only in their ultimate demise, but also in how people change over the course of his stories. Characters who start out looking normal, even beautiful, become haunting, sick versions of themselves, or go insane as their sanity shatters.
Two of the strongest examples are Dissection Girl and Uzumaki. The first features a disturbed woman who wishes to be dissected. Her wish is ultimately granted at the end of the story, culminating in one of Junji Ito’s most fantastically disturbing panels. It is revealed that not only her mind but also her body is heavily distorted. Uzumaki, on the other hand, is a three-volume masterpiece about a small town haunted by spirals. Over the course of the story, many inhabitants become obsessed with spirals and are warped and twisted until their bodies reflect the spiral in various horrible ways.
Junji Ito’s brand of body horror is always a disturbing delight to look at, and it often renders his characters almost unrecognizable.
One of Junji Ito’s most common tropes is mental illness. Depression, fears, phobias, and obsessions are often the focus of his stories. Yet Ito isn’t satisfied with merely exploring them. Often, an irrational fear or phobia is only the starting point, and over the course of the story he amplifies and distorts it until it ends in utter madness.
His characters’ minds get distorted and change much like their bodies. As eyes bulge and mouths hang open in terrible screams, their minds, too, are inevitably broken.
Powerful emotions and erratic, irrational behavior are common in his work and almost commonplace among his characters. They are eccentric weirdos, people whose entire being revolves around a single trait, often a personal blend of mental illness, fear, or phobia.
Obsession is the leitmotif in Junji Ito’s Tomie, which features a woman so beautiful that any man who sees her becomes obsessed. Many other stories also center on obsession. It can be caused by love, animosity, jealousy, or even the urge to possess a particular object. Each of these stories ends with people giving in to their obsession, being changed by it, and ultimately facing dire consequences.
Love, too, is something Ito often exploits and distorts. What begins as a harmless crush soon becomes a dangerous obsession that drives people mad. Strong examples include Tomie, Lovesick Dead, and the chapter Jack-in-the-Box in Uzumaki.
As mentioned before, Junji Ito often pushes his characters’ fears and phobias to their limits, driving them into despair and insanity.
The reason is simple: his characters are often inevitably doomed. Similar to figures in the works of Franz Kafka or H. P. Lovecraft, they have little power over their world.
We see it clearly in Uzumaki, where an entire town becomes an inescapable hell and characters realize there is no hope, no way out. In a similar way, The Enigma of Amigara Fault toys with curiosity and with inevitable fate. People flock to the human-shaped holes that mirror them and, compelled by a primal urge, enter despite themselves.
Existential dread sits at the core of our being. As humans, we are the only creatures on this planet who know that we will die one day, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Ito’s stories are full of this dread, and his worlds are harsher than our own, stranger, more dangerous, and indifferent to the people within them. The horror often arises from the most mundane places, showing that nothing is safe in Junji Ito’s world. There are no safe spaces, and even the most ordinary thing can lead to a terrible, irreversible event.
Town Without Streets is a prime example. It examines privacy and pushes it to its extremes. What would you do if privacy no longer existed? Would you reject such a world and fight against it, or accept it and discard the idea of privacy altogether? It is a topic that feels even more relevant today.
Another strong example is Long Dream. It asks whether endless dreaming could be a way to defeat death. Is it better to be trapped in a dream forever than to die? Is even a never-ending nightmare preferable to ceasing to exist?
Isolation is another dominant theme in Ito’s work. As mentioned before, many of his characters struggle with problems and isolate themselves from society.
Ito presents a different view of isolation in Army of One. Safety in numbers is usually the rule in horror. In Army of One, however, he twists that idea, and those who stay alone, who truly isolate themselves, are the ones who remain safe. It is a strange story, but one ripe with meaning. It seems to point to our urbanized society and the forced social interactions common in it, especially in Japan. Is it ultimately better to remain on your own than to join an often forced social life?
Lingering Farewell is a study of holding on and refusing to accept the death of loved ones, and it is also one of Junji Ito’s best stories.
Black Paradox is one of Ito’s weirdest works, but in its later parts it raises an interesting question. In the story’s context, humanity uses its own souls as a new source of energy. The broader idea is clear: we may bring about our own end through greed and the hunger for power.
Hanging Balloons may seem nonsensical at first glance, but there is more here than meets the eye. The first person to die is Terumi, an idol. If you are familiar with Japanese pop culture and the idol industry, you know suicides are an unfortunate reality. Yet the story is not simply a critique of the idol system.
Similar to The Enigma of Amigara Fault, the story engages with Sigmund Freud’s death drive, our fascination with self-destruction and the compulsion to move toward it. Most of us suppress those thoughts, but some do not.
While The Enigma of Amigara Fault shows characters driven by a strange, almost supernatural obsession to find their holes, Hanging Balloons takes a different route. The balloons are a personification of the death drive, and the story functions as an allegory of that impulse catching up with and preying upon people.
Examples like these show that while Junji Ito is predominantly an artist who creates visual nightmares, his work often carries deeper meaning.
It always strikes me that works as bloody, surreal, and twisted as Ito’s can also convey layered themes. That added depth gives readers something to ponder when they want more than blood and gore alone.
